I often hear people complain. Complaining about ‘other people’. And recently I heard someone quite subtly and passive-aggressively grumble about Chinese people and ‘their’ practice of adopting ‘English’ names. They sounded almost offended by what is basically a lazy attempt at ‘cultural assimilation’ through ‘nominal appropriation’ – such that it caught my attention. But it also made me wonder, ‘English names’? What are English names? John? Kimberly? Peter? Kevin? I had to google for hours to no avail; at least as far as the origins of these common ‘English’ names are concerned, I couldn’t find an English name. Not one. It turns out, a lot of the names we give to children in the UK are either Celtic or Hebrew in origin (I don’t know the respective percentage).

Take John for example, a very common English name, but really how English is it, when you consider that it is an anglicised Hebrew name originally transliterated into Greek and then Latin Ioannes, meaning “Yahweh is Gracious”. Peter? Peter It’s from the Greek word ‘petros’ meaning stone/rock, a direct translation of ‘cephas’ or ‘keppa’, an Aramaic word meaning the same. Kevin? That’s just a failed attempt to pronounce and spell a common Irish name ‘Caoimhín’, by the English.

Long story short, if a Jewish singer can change his German name (Zimmerman) to a distinctly Welsh-sounding name (Dylan), and get away with it, I’d say, leave them Chinese people alone.

Apologies for missing in action last week. I was away (mentally) for the past couple of weeks. The good news is that little distraction is coming to an end and my attention is back where it should be; here.

There’s a scene in When Harry met Sally (old film – I know) where Harry is trying to introduce Sally to his friend Jess. Here’s how the conversation goes.

Jess: If she’s so great why aren’t you taking her out?

Harry: How many times do I have to tell you, we’re just friends.

Jess: So you’re saying she’s not that attractive.

Harry: No, I told you she is attractive.

Jess: Yeah but you also said she has a good personality.

Harry: She has a good personality.

…

Jess: When someone’s not that attractive, they’re always described as having a good personality.

Harry: Look, if you had asked me what does she look like and I said, she has a good personality, that means she’s not attractive. But just because I happen to mention that she has a good personality, she could be either. She could be attractive with a good personality, or not attractive with a good personality

In the last part of the conversation, Harry basically explained the concept of ‘implicature’, a term coined by Paul Grice in 1961, to describe uttered words or sentences implying a meaning beyond the literal sense of what is explicitly stated.

Let me explain further.

Anna: Is he attractive?

Brown: He has a good personality.

Basically, Brown would have meant that he is not attractive. But the words in his sentence in themselves don’t mean that he’s not attractive, as Brown did not say that he isn’t attractive. He implied it i.e. Brown implicated that he is not attractive (that he is not attractive was his implicature. Another example below.

Charlie: Did you kill Brown, because he’s not attractive?

Dianna: I found him attractive.

Here Dianna didn’t really answer the question and she is misleading as Dianna is not directly confirming or denying either way. Dianna is uttering those words to lead Charlie to infer that Dianna meant she didn’t kill Brown because she found him attractive as the basis of her killing would have been whether she found him attractive or not. But Charlie’s inference would have to be accompanied with the assumption that Dianna’s reply was indeed in response to Charlie’s question in that particular context. If Charlie did assume and infer the (supposedly) implied, that would leave Dianna room to manoeuvre later, and claim “I’ve never said that”, which technically isn’t untrue. It’s a great skill/trick if you know how to use it, and a huge pain if you’re at the receiving end of it. So, if you have yet to master this art, save yourselves the trouble of inference, and be direct.

Good morning,
I had a somewhat less than pleasant encounter with a teacher who taught one of those STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects at a local school in London. Upon learning that I worked in engineering, perhaps to sound agreeable, she interjected with an air of pride, not dissimilar to the kind of pride displayed by those people who are (worryingly) proud of paying taxes or not littering, “I always encourage my students to go into STEM related professions. At this, I snapped if a little bit. My immediate reaction was “Um. Why would you do that? These kids can and deserve to have a bright future. Why would you actively subject young fledgling hopeful things to a life of dispiritingly, perpetually oversupplied, anxiety-infested market?” Startled and stunned like a deer caught in the headlights, and unable to formulate a quick enough response to these verbal convulsions of temporary insanity, she had no choice but to listen to my ensuing rant. Repeatedly.

In conjunction with a few other minor indiscretions, it turned out a few minutes later that she had had enough of this ‘nonsense’ (or overwhelming enlightenment, depending on point of view); she stood up and left the table.

We often hear about shortages in the science and engineering workforce both in the UK and the US (e.g. here, and here), but I I wonder if this is generally true at all and maybe the initiative is more about wage suppression; certainly I’ve not personally seen any evidence of skills shortage or hiring difficulties in my line of work. I won’t go into the details as there are articles available online that express this concern in a far more articulate manner (this and this), but from what I’ve read so far, at least this much is true – engineering graduates are more likely to be unemployed after graduation than average. Let that one sink in and if you’re thinking about having kids – first, don’t. If it’s too late for you and you’re already having one or have had one, make sure you keep them out of harm’s way – the STEM way.

A: “It’s not that small. Probably not much smaller than the average one-bed flat in London.”

B:”No way.”

Recently, I’ve had this conversation with a few of my mates – most recently, this Wednesday. The recurring incredulity in everyone’s response to my size comparison as a justification for purchase, got to me in the end and I decided to look for some solid numbers to back up my claim – and to be helpful just in case you’re also considering this option as your main home.

According to this article, the size of average one-bedroom flat in typical new build development is 500 sq ft – the article also features a website that sells ‘pocket-sized’ mini-flats whose size averages 400 sq ft (I’m in no way affiliated with this enterprise but they look pretty good. And if they offered money, I would not reject it, just to be clear).

I couldn’t find a similar article for studio flats, but I did some ‘original’ research by browsing through various studio flats’ floor plans on Zoopla, the average of which was circa 300 sq ft.

A decent live-aboard narrow barge would be 60 ft long and 6ft wide, making the average floor area a cool 360 sq ft (or take off 15% for the engine room etc., you still end up with 306 sq ft.).

In conclusion, I was right; in terms of floor area, the following is true:

I work in engineering. By now most of you know that. In fact a lot of people I came to know in the past few years are unfortunately from this field. I say ‘unfortunate’ for a good reason, not to be humorous but because people are made redundant on a regular basis in engineering. Where I work in particular, I’ve seen the number of workers go from circa 1000 to 250 in the space of less than 3 years. Indeed this is what preoccupied much of my mind this week; to stretch a trite metaphor, the impending ‘axe’ to be sharpened and to be deployed, the direction of its swing, the amplitude of its oscillation, the dampening effect on the oscillation etc.. So I wondered ‘why’ naturally, and after a number of discussions with colleagues, we all agreed that it was because of outsourcing of work to those so-called ‘high value centres’, the decline of the specific industry we work in, automation and the cyclical nature of the market we depend on etc. As true and obvious as that sounds, I wondered further, if there was more to the quagmire in which we currently find ourselves, than the immediately obvious reasons that brought us to that conclusion.

Then this week, I had a pleasant chance encounter with the concept of ‘survivorship bias’. It’s an easy enough concept to understand – whatever data we have, we have (easy access to) them because something survived or succeeded. For those that either didn’t survive or didn’t quite succeed, either we have no access to their data or they are ignored. The example that best illustrates this point is the study conducted by the ‘famous’ Hungarian/American statistician Abraham Wald, the ultimate aim of which was to minimise aircraft losses to anti-aircraft attacks. The available data-set for this study was from the aircraft that had returned from missions, and survived the damages like in the image below (not mine).

The seemingly obvious recommendation for reinforcement/extra armour would have been for the damaged areas. However, Wald, being quite a clever chap, reasoned that since the returned aircraft had survived despite the damages, there would be no good reason to provide extra armour in those areas. Inversely in the absence of any data from the aircraft that had not survived and never returned, it would make more sense to take chances with providing extra armour in the areas with no or little damage in the surviving aircraft as it was more reasonable to assume that those were the areas of damage that might have caused them to crash. The damages in the returning aircraft represented areas where a bomber could take a hit and still survive. Wald therefore made his recommendations based on this reasoning.

Back to my original engineering/redundancy problem. I agree that outsourcing and decline in the industry are two of the few reasons why there are so many redundancies in (construction-related) engineering as well as the fluctuating nature of the market. But it is also possible that back in the days of our parents’ generation, in the post-war economy, engineers were scarce and that engineering was one of the most stable and abundant work categories to be employed in. Having spotted those opportunities (readily available data) at the time, perhaps they promoted this line of work and encouraged the following generation to be engaged in this sector. Alas, with no access to the missing data set (i.e. future) they had perhaps fallen victim to the ‘survivorship bias’ and made the matters worse by over-crowding the engineering employment market with their ill-thought-through albeit well-intended encouragement.

All this is just a conjecture with inconsistent logical fallacies but worth a thought or two especially when it comes to recommending choices for the future based on the current reality and situations. In my opinion, there’s too much emphasis on STEM subjects at the moment especially in computer-related STEM subjects. You watch this space. In 20 years time, there could be overcrowding of coders and programmers. In any case, whatever you do, remember, all the data available to you isn’t all the data there is.

Have a fully comprehensive Friday; take Saturday and Sunday into account if you need to.

Apologies for skipping last week’s – a little personal affairs hiccup. Speaking of hiccups it looks like London had something pretty major happen to her this week. Condolences to those who unfortunately lost their lives – not that I knew any of them but hey, it could have been any one of us.

Moving on. To distract myself from all this madness, I pulled out from my bookshelf, a copy of Les Miserables (abridged version, obviously – none of us have any time for that verbose gibberish in its entirety despite the book’s epic masterpiece status). When I started reading the editor’s preface to the book, I came across something interesting (so, yes, I naturally stopped pretending that i actually wanted to read the book itself). The editor claimed to have decided to edit and publish that abridged version in order to make accessible what is otherwise an extremely long book with a large amount of unrelated essays which neither advance the plot (or even subplot) nor reveal anything about its characters – he went on further to explain that this was because back in the days writers in Europe (by which he meant mostly England and France), writers got paid per word. So I was naturally sceptical. Paid by the word? Like ‘old clothes sold by weight‘?

So I did my due diligence to substantiate this claim and it turned out while there’s some truth to it, the editor probably wanted to sound deliberately provocative and sensational. Basically, Les Mis was a serial novel published in installments in periodicals – basically a 19th century equivalent of a box-set (think ‘Game of Thrones’ rather than recycled clothes). Just like the series that we see on Netflix today, back in the days writers would keep going only if the story proved to be popular, or if not, the publisher would kill off the story. Just like I might kill off this blog if no one reads it.

The 8th of March was the International Women’s Day, a day singled out to celebrate women’s achievements, womanhood in general and to promote gender equality etc. For the purpose of gender equality, the 19th of November is the International Men’s Day also devoted to double-underlining their own under-represented issues and achievements, or something along that line.

Being a social dissident albeit a moderate one, I’ve never been able to pay or maintain much attention to the mainstream celebrations and events, not for lack of trying but my proclivity, whether predisposed or acquired, for all things unimportant and irrelevant, often lead me astray to something just about related but slightly offbeat. This week, I was led to articles reporting skewed gender ratios at work place, and how these drive our behaviour.

We’ve all heard this before; ‘sex sells’. The now old adage that refers to the use of sex appeal/pronounced and exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics in advertising to help sales of products and services. But there’s a new (antithetical) phrase in town; ‘lack of sex earns’ (rubbish tagline, I know). But let me elaborate; this article published in Association for Consumer Research, with little or no significant gender differences, with regard to gender ratio in the U.S. showed that a (perceived) scarcity of available mates (in their locality) was strongly related to people entering high-paying careers and/or pursuit of monetary rewards.

One of the studies conducted for this paper involved female and male participants being (falsely) led to believe one of the following three things about their local population:

male-skewed

female-skewed, or

equal sex ratio.

Predictably, when asked to indicate their desire to pursue high-paying careers versus starting a family, findings showed a scarcity of the opposite sex for both genders, prioritised earning money relative to investing in family.

Where does that leave us? Well, some of us who work in gender-screwed industries such as engineering/construction, often wonder why some folks in our offices are so money-obsessed and reward-driven, (and to our dismay how we’re becoming the same as years go by). Wonder no more. Lack of sex earns.